← more from
Independent Project Records
We’ve updated our Terms of Use to reflect our new entity name and address. You can review the changes here.
We’ve updated our Terms of Use. You can review the changes here.

The One That Got Away

from Robot X by Woo

supported by
krtzmnn
krtzmnn thumbnail
morningfactories
morningfactories thumbnail
amikam goldman
amikam goldman thumbnail
/

  • Streaming + Download

    Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.
    Purchasable with gift card

      $1 USD  or more

     

  • Buy the Full Digital Album

about

A previously unreleased song, ‘The One That Got Away’ makes for an intriguing addition to the expanded IPR edition of Woo’s Robot X - it had been recorded in the 80s, around the same time as the album’s other tracks - and, with its raw and industrial sound, beautifully complements they're aesthetics.
For Woo’s Clive Ives it was a small step after he created robot collages for the Robot X and Xylophonics’ album covers, to envisage these images being animated for a video.
“Within the next couple of years”, he ponders, “robotic companies around the world will begin to mass produce humanoid robots to work in
collaboration with humans in many diverse areas - e.g., industrial robotics, service robotics, medical robotics, military robotics”.
The video imagines its own robotic future: in the first section, Ives utilises flying robots to create a comic version of surveillance. In the middle section he then focuses on the mass production of robots, showing how our environment could be affected by it and the waste of resources as these robots become obsolete and discarded. In the final 15 seconds of the music Robot X escapes the junkyard and flies off into the sunset. He becomes ‘The One That Got Away’. Like the rest of the songs that make up Robot X, Ives’ video was inspired by the Terry Gilliam classic Brazil. “His film was futuristic”, he explains, “but set in what appeared 1930’s environments. My film uses these old etchings collaged together
to create antiquated machines/robots that clearly won’t be very useful or
functional”. Connecting the two is also an interesting use of billboards which, in Gilliam’s film, had been employed to “create a facade to the squalid reality of the environment”, as Ives points out adding, “he had a vast amount of ducting, and my film also has a token gesture of ducting”. In the video for ‘The One That Got Away’ the strap line on the billboard “Your Functional Friend” is meant to make the viewerquestion this claim…
 
Will they be functional?
(They don’t look functional!)
Will they be our friend? 
(That’s the big question!)

“Even top AI and robotics experts can’t predict the future of these technologies”, Clive Ives reflects. “In the right hands, they suggest, there could be many benefits,but in the wrong hands… double trouble!”

credits

from Robot X, track released January 23, 2024

license

all rights reserved

tags

about

Woo image

Woo UK

Oddly dubby, mesmeric, insular, playful, undefinable, instantly recognisable, warm, romantic, optimistic, ethereal, timeless, pop music for another universe, time-locked into the spirit of ’67, witty yet quintessentially British, futuristic elevator muzak. ... more

contact / help

Contact Woo

Streaming and
Download help

Redeem code

Report this track or account

If you like Woo, you may also like:

Bandcamp Daily  your guide to the world of Bandcamp

On Bandcamp Radio

Featuring interviews with LA music scene pillar Kamasi Washington, and new London-based duo Mrcy.

listen now